Policy Posted for Comment

[meri_oddities]

We've posted the Fandoms as Category policy change to the policies section of Fanlore. We'd like to open it up for comment. You can find it here.

We, the wiki committee, don't work in a vacuum and would like your input on this. If possible, We'd like to have the discussion here on Dreamwidth. It's easy to answer questions and respond to comments. If discussion becomes unwieldy, we can schedule a chat in the Fanlore chat room.

This is only the first of several policies we're working on and are planning to put out for comment in the next few months. So, let us know what you think.

Comments

[meri_oddities]

Yes, I was thinking of what is now the subpages, but now that you mention it, I think it should probably include all fan works for the fandom. But maybe not on the same level as characters and pairings.

Let me see if I've got this:

Okay, let's say there is a ST zine page for XXX zine and at the bottom you'd put Category: Star Trek, Zines. When you click on the Category Star Trek it would list the zine? But that could be huge mess (especially with all the ST zines that exist and are now being put into Fanlore) since you'd have all the characters and all the zines listed together. What you'd need to do is list "zines" under Star Trek and then click on that and get your list of links.

How do we make that happen?

[aethel]

>Yes, I was thinking of what is now the subpages, but now that you mention it, I think it should probably include all fan works for the fandom. But maybe not on the same level as characters and pairings.

So I was thinking that the fandom categories would be applied to: the main fandom page(s), character pages, pairing pages, other subpages*, and fandom-specific glossary terms. Adding fanworks to the category would quickly overwhelm the core fandom pages, thus defeating the purpose of having the fandom category.**

*So lists and things would need to be renamed to say "List of Stargate Communities", for example?

**unless we go with portal pages, where all the characters, pairings, and sub-fandoms and spin-off fandoms can be organized in handy charts like on Wikipedia. Then we can add fanworks to the fandom category, yes?

[meri_oddities]

I think I said somewhere else here that I like the idea of Portals. But yes, to what you said about list of whatever in the top level category rather than each fanwork.

Still, I'd like to see something a little more automatic than just "list of..." which has to be updated manually. And in the case of ST zines, there are a billion of them.

Maybe it's just not possible.

[ratcreature]

I don't know, but we'd definitely want to avoid the situation that right now is making categories like "Fiction Writing" useless because it lists pretty much everything and there is no real discernible substructure. I mean in that category pages like "fanfiction", "slash", "drabble" and "story tropes" are buried in the middle of thousands of zines and online stories. Many if not most of our current categories are useless for browsing.

making a side point here about zines

[morgandawn]

I like how the other fan wiki handles zines - right now on fanlore you click on zines and you get a list of every zine in all fandoms. totally useless. but if we have a way to click on Fanzines: xxx fandom it would be handier. and even with larger fandoms like Star Trek - a list of all the star trek zines is still more manageable than a list of every fanzine every made. and most fandoms are not the size of star trek.

the other benefit in having a zine by fandom category this is we won't have to manually create a list of all Fandom X zines by hand (which is what we're doing now) - work effort that could be used elsewhere.

ex: http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Category:Due_South_fanzines

is much simpler than creating these tables by hand - and updating them by hand
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Due_south_fanzines

Re: making a side point here about zines

[meri_oddities]

So, what you'd have to do is create categories for: Harry Potter Zines, Star Trek Zines, due South zines, or whatever?

This isn't exactly the same thing as fandoms by Category. But I think we should look into doing this additionally.

I like the way Fan History does it. It makes a lot of sense if we're going to list all the zines in the world, we need to be able to organize them.

Do you have time to write up a couple of paragraphs on this problem and how we should fix it, and send it to the wiki committee? We meet in about two weeks. I can do it, but it's going to take me a while to get time to actually do write it up.

Re: making a side point here about zines

[ratcreature]

Yes, if categories can't be combined with AND like tags can (e.g. if you can't somehow make a wiki display everything with category zine + category start trek), they need to be more fine grained from the outset.